Page 12 of Exit Party

The walk to the RE/MAX office took her across an expressway, along a back road that led to the service entrance of a massive convention centre that had functioned as a Red Cross regional headquarters for the past three years, through several parking lots, past all of the usual names and places: Chili’s, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts. She stepped over a drainage ditch behind the doughnut shop and crossed a strip of long grass to the parking lot behind the Walmart. At the back of the parking lot there was a mass of blackberry vines that no one seemed to care about, a thicket of thorns and green. This was her favourite part of the walk. The Cincinnati United mall was just ahead.

No one else was in the office at this hour, so she let herself in and settled in front of a computer. It took her some time to find Kareem. There were so many missing people now, dead or just out of touch with loved ones, and she was unsure of the spelling of his name. But once she found him, she pieced the story together quickly, mostly through his friend James’s social media posts. (“I feel crazy,” James said, in some back corridor of memory, and she locked the door and came to sit beside him on a bed with a pile of jackets.) Kareem had disappeared from a party in Los Angeles in the spring of 2031. He’d never resurfaced, and his body was never found.

It took very little time to find James’s phone number.

“I’m not sure if you’ll remember me,” she said, when they’d gotten names out of the way, “but we met at the party where Kareem disappeared.”

He laughed. “You’re not sure if I’ll remember you? I don’t know what kind of parties you go to, Ari, but that wasn’t the kind of thing I’d normally do.”

“That was memorable,” she said.

“It certainly was. You calling to reminisce? Because I’m here for that, if you are.”

“I’m trying to track down my friend Gloria. She was at that party. Did you know her?”

James was quiet. “Yeah,” he said, in a guarded way.

“She moved to Europe, right?”

“I think Paris. But that was years ago already, who knows where she is now.”

“James, did Gloria have a twin?”

He said nothing, but there was tension in his silence.

“I live in Ohio now,” Ari said. “Outside Cincinnati.”

“I heard the Republic of Ohio’s splintering. North and south republics, or something?”

“Yeah, it seems like it,” Ari said. “It’s definitely less stable now than a year ago. Anyway, I work for a militia.”

“Sounds like a dangerous line of work.”

“It’s more boring than you’d think. It’s a lot of sitting around in cars and hanging out in bars waiting for people. No one really notices me. But the other day I was assigned to photograph a woman, and, well, she looks exactly like Gloria. I mean, exactly the same face.”

“Christ,” James murmured, seemingly to himself.

“It took me a while to see it, because every detail is different. When I knew Gloria she had long dark hair, no glasses, too much makeup. This woman, her hair’s buzzed and bleached, she wears these big glasses, but their faces are exactly the same. A lot of people look alike,” Ari said. “But it’s her voice, her voice is the same too. And even then, okay, that’s weird but not impossible, but she called me Ibari.”

“But you’re Ari, right?”

“Yeah. Ibari’s the name on my birth certificate, but I literally never use it, and the last time a stranger called me Ibari, it was at that party in LA.” There was a sound from outside, gunfire in the far distance. Ari listened but it didn’t come again.

“This woman,” James said, “this other Gloria. She looks the same, but she doesn’t have the scar on her forehead, right?”

“Right,” Ari said. “You know her?”

“No. But I’ve seen her before. I will spend the rest of my life trying to understand what happened at that party,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’ll think I’m some kind of maniac if I try to describe it.”

“I promise I won’t think you’re crazy.”

James sighed. “There was a problem at that party, even before Kareem disappeared. Hours before. There were . . .” He paused, seemingly searching for words. “There were extra people.”

“You mean uninvited guests?”

He laughed in a rough, mirthless way. “You could say that, yeah.”

“Could you please just tell me what you’re talking about?”